Bill Gates of Microsoft loves to be seen as the generous Uncle Bill. However, his true self was revealed recently. We had the biggest, most destructive natural disaster in decades – and Uncle Bill, the richest man in the world, can be only bothered to donate US$ 3 millions.
Compare this to Mr Schumacher, who donated US$ 10 millions straight away.
I think I’ll be watching F1 more often now then buying Microsoft software.
Source: [ Wikipedia ] (see near bottom of the page)
I’ve been interested in and looking for an ideal multi-function device for years now, partly because it’ll enable me to work anywhere anytime, without getting bogged down with big & heavy equipment.
The Treo 650 looks most interesting now, especially after a series of hacks which increased its capabilities significantly.
However – at this form-factor, I’ve found they’re still not powerful enough, because Li-ion (at that size) simply still doesn’t have enough capacity to power a more powerful processor, for an acceptable length of time.
Various wireless features (bluetooth, WiFi, GSM, etc) also suck on batteries like babies on milk bottle.
So after years of waiting, I must concede defeat, and will forget my dream for now – until a much better battery technology become mainstream.
US gov’t likes to be seen as the generous and caring Uncle Sam. However, they true self was revealed momentarily, when the tsunami disaster hit Asia a few days ago.
When nations are donating vast amount of aid and money, US gov’t donated less than even Sweden.
Only after Jan Egeland, Norwegian UN undersecretary, criticised them severely, then US gov’t suddenly increased their donation and moved their troops into the disaster area.
Now US troops are among the most efficient helper in the area, but that won’t happen without the smack from Egeland. For that, Mr Jan Egeland, please accept my thanks on behalf of Aceh people and other victims – and we sincerely hope that Mr Bush’s wrath on your statement won’t cost you anything too dearly 
Allahu akbar…. di berita di Yahoo ini, diperlihatkan sebuah mesjid di tepi pantai Meulaboh yang tetap berdiri tegak, ketika bangunan-bangunan di sekitarnya sudah rata dengan tanah.
Foto ini juga sudah saya arsip disini:
In the last few days, I was still in shock over the tsunami & quake disaster that hit Aceh. Personally I’ve lost contact with a few friends, and we don’t really expect to hear from them again. Then I looked around, and try to think of what I can do about this.
Being so far away, the easiest thing is to donate money. Since I’m a UK taxpayer, I can make my donations goes further by claiming Gift Aid – which will make the UK gov add 28% from my donation to it.
Looking around, I also see there’s something I can do with my computer. Many existing websites on Aceh Disaster are not easily updated, and only its webmasters can do that. Also I couldn’t find any of them offering information in English – which is vital if we want to keep the world informed about it and thus able to donate/help the victim. Or to help inform English-speakers who happen to have friends/relatives in Aceh.
So I created aceh.abangadek.com, as a complement to other websites that already exist out there.
I based the website on phpWiki, so anyone can put in bits information that they have into it. Also I’ve started providing an English section on it.
I do realise that the most help can be done by being out there on Aceh itself, but being so far away, there’s only so much that I can do. So I’m not expecting much from all of this, even if it can help 1 person then it’s already worth my time.
Let us do all that we could to help the people of Aceh.
Do good – help kill a spammer today.
Recommended link-of-the-day : [ The Lad Vampire ]
The Lad Vampire specially targeted fake bank websites. They seems to be quite careful not to target an innocent victim, and they have actually shut down scammers’ websites.
And they already got many applause – from The Register, Computer Times, Monterey Herald, The New York Times, etc.
Funny links:
# A scammer got scammed and lost his gold
# 419eater.com is a website which, among others, get scammers to make silly photos of themselves, and then posted for the world to see.
I have a feeling this won’t be the last post on this topic, so see you soon.
note:
do NOT use the alternate SpamVampire (the one located at feedbackarchive.com). It seems that they’re not a very careful bunch, at least they’ve targeted one innocent victim (123count.com) – and one victim is one too many already.
Hellacious Riders website is giving away 1 Terabyte email accounts.
Finally, an email account that’s bigger than the hard disks in my computer 
but I got a feeling that this offer won’t last forever.
So better get one while it’s still hot ?
Blogs have been under massive attack from spammers lately; I totally didn’t expect to have so many posts about this single topic in this blog.
But with Trencaspammer users as the last casualties, I think investing in a heavy spam defense – such as Spaminator or WP-AuthImage is actually now worth the trouble of installing them.
I’ve installed WP-AuthImage here and it seems to be working, and for a long time I hope.
But with the spammers continuing to attack our defenses, I think it’s time to fight back.
Continue reading WordPress’ spammers
I’m at loss of words already on the tragedy that’s the quake in Indonesia – but there’s some more. Apprently, this quake may have been predicted as early as a year ago.
But the Indonesian government, of course, didn’t do anything about it.
It’s the little people that’s paying the price anyway, so the elites naturally can’t be bothered about it at all.
I feel very tired.
Pagi ini lihat berita BBC1, sedang heboh soal gempa dan tsunami di India. Huh ?
Wong gempanya di Aceh kok yang dibahas dan diperlihatkan malah India saja.
Kelihatannya Indonesia sebentar lagi bakalan hilang sekalian dari peta dunia..
Debian security team meng-klaim bahwa package php4 di Woody tidak perlu di-patch – walaupun tim PHP telah mengrilis PHP versi 4.3.10.
Dan padahal tim phpBB sudah menyatakan bahwa dengan PHP versi sebelum 4.3.10, phpBB menjadi vulnerable lagi
Duh….. kelihatannya bakalan terpaksa pakai paket LAMP non-Woody nih tapi, kalau tambah banyak saja paket non-Woody di server saya, makin berkurang alasan untuk menggunakan Debian stable/Woody dong ?
Just a quick plug for this very nice website:
[ http://www.debian-administration.org/ ]
A hacker’s story on dedication, with happy ending :
It’s midnight. I’ve been working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I’m not being paid. In fact, my project was canceled six months ago, so I’m evading security, sneaking into Apple Computer’s main offices in the heart of Silicon Valley, doing clandestine volunteer work for an eight-billion-dollar corporation.
Apparently, this graphing calculator quite successfully introduced kids & people to math, who wouldn’t otherwise.
Awesome. These are the kind of people I become jealous to.
Some excellent quotes:
“the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent – the attention to detail – makes a good product.”
“The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends.”
“Sitting behind a one-way mirror, watching first-time users struggle with our software, reminded me that programmers are the least qualified people to design software for novices.”
“It shipped on more than twenty million machines. It never officially existed.”
Too bad he failed on getting it into Microsoft Windows though.
This where another fun started to begin – ripped straight from Kevin Mitnick’s book, someone pretended to be a troll, by pretending to know the security in Microsoft campus. A Microsoft employee took the bait 
but a kind soul let him know of his mistake (fun spoilers!!)
Oh man… easily the best laugh I’ve had in weeks, that one.
Itu adalah judul artikel yang ditulis oleh Rob Rosenberger.
Apa yang ditulisnya saya kira sebagian besar benar – jika pengguna Firefox / Thunderbird / Fedora / dll sudah menjadi mayoritas, maka para pembuat virus akan mulai mentargetkan mereka.
Namun, saya yakin mereka akan mengalami kesulitan untuk dapat mengakses komputer kita dengan leluasa — tetapi, bukannya mustahil.
Setelah sempat menjalankan server dengan sistim operasi OpenBSD, saya sadar bahwa masih banyak soal security yang perlu dibenahi pada berbagai software open source lainnya.
Dan bahkan OpenBSD pun masih bisa dijebol – misalnya, jika kita menjalankan phpBB versi lama di server tersebut.
Jadi solusi untuk keamanan komputer adalah perlindungan yang menyeluruh, titik.
Sehingga kalimat berikut ini dari penulis artikel tersebut sebetulnya tidak benar :
You can’t blame your security problems on the operating system you use, or on the email software you use, or on the browser you use.
Tentu saja bisa pak kalau tidak percaya, silahkan saja tanyakan kepada kawan-kawan yang sudah saya pasangi Firefox di komputernya.
Menarik sekali – CinePaint adalah software image editing yang sudah bisa menyaingi Photoshop, untuk soal editing gambar. Wow…. tidak sangka akhirnya ada yang bisa menyaingi software kelas berat ini
Lebih detilnya bisa [ dibaca di komentar ini ].
ck, ck….
Kutipan:
Belum lama ini, (September 2004), Rabithatul Ma’ahid Islamiyah (RMI), Cabang Kabupaten Pasuruan, Jawa Timur, menerbitkan sebuah buku berjudul “Menguak Kebatilan dan Kebohongan Sekte FK3”. RMI adalah organisasi ikatan Pondok Pesantren di bawah Naungan Organisasi Nahdhatul Ulama (NU)
Telaah kritis para ulama Jawa Timur ini sungguh menyejukkan. Di tengah kegersangan situasi intelektual, mereka mau dan berani berbicara yang benar, mereka berani melawan arus besar, Gerakan yang mengatasnamakan kesetaraan gender, yang justru disebarkan oleh para elite NU sendiri. Apa yang mereka sebut sebagai “Sekte FK3” (Forum Kajian Kitab Kuning), yang melakukan tindakan kebatilan dan kebohongan, adalah orang-orang yang cukup terkenal di kalangan NU sendiri. Di situ ada nama Sinta Nuriyah Abdurrahman Wahid, Masdar F. Masudi, Husen Muhammad, Lies Marcus, dan sebagainya.
Selengkapnya bisa dibaca di:
hidayatullah.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1482
Berhubung waktu yang terbatas, akhirnya diputuskan untuk menggunakan Trencaspammer disini.
Eh, jadinya malah makan waktu entah kenapa, walaupun kelihatan simple, Trencaspammer ngaco jalannya.
Pertama kali karena tidak ada support untuk lib GD di PHP – “apt-get install php4-gd”, lho kok masih gak jalan ? Ternyata harusnya “apt-get install php4-gd2” baru muncul deh captcha-nya.
Tapi kemudian ada keanehan berikutnya, jika kita masukkan kode yang benar di form comment, tetap saja dibilang salah (huh?)
Setelah men-debug beberapa lama dan kesimpulannya tetap sama, yaitu Trencaspammer “seharusnya” berjalan tanpa masalah, akhirnya menyerah.
Tapi jadinya malah makin penasaran dengan captcha, dan kemudian mencoba AuthImage
Kali ini langsung berjalan dengan mulus ya sudah, sementara ini dulu deh, hehe
note: AuthImage butuh lib GD dan FreeType — untuk di Debian, kelihatannya kedua-duanya sudah di-install ketika kita mengetikkan apt-get install php4-gd2, cukup menyenangkan.
Blog ini di-setup dengan Permalink aktif, tapi link di menu “Archives” (di kalender dan nama-nama bulan, di sebelah kanan) pada tidak berjalan.
Ternyata, dari kode yang dibuat oleh WordPress untuk ditaruh di .htaccess ada yang kurang, yaitu :
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})?-([0-9]{1,2})?-([0-9]{1,2})?/?$ /index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})?-([0-9]{1,2})?/?$ /index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2 [QSA]
Sekarang link-link di “Archives” sudah berjalan sebagaimana mestinya.
First there were Brazilian criminals. Now a phpBB worm is on the wild, defacing any websites still running old version of phpBB.
Idban already showed a quick fix for this to be placed in .htaccess file.
Alternatively, if you have mod_security installed, you can put this instead :
SecFilter "^(.*)2esystem(.*)"
/etc/init.d/apache restart, and you’re set.